It’s Name is Lakitu

Is suffering a must for real reckoning and growth in life?

Tiger Woods was completely humiliated during his car tree wife debacle; Steve Jobs said getting fired by his own company was the best thing that had happened to him. It is very clear that these violent jolts in life, when embraced, are soul redefining. They are events that can crumble and or rebuild you. It’s not all rosy-the odds look grim for that young girl that had had her third unplanned pregnancy after the drug induced blackout at her 14th birthday (real story).

Is suffering therefore a must for real reckoning and growth in life? This is not a useful question.

Life is going to suck. The more useful question is, when shit comes, what am I going to do about it?

Or maybe an even better question is, can I trick my brain to turn each shitty moment as something less negative?

When I played Super Mario Brothers, I didn’t love the Goombas and the Piranha Flowers. In fact some of them drove me nuts. Lakitu was the dickhead of the genre. I hated that piece of shit.

It floated in mid air. It threw shit at you, and it had the best AI in the 8-bit day because it somehow had this annoying ability to keep just enough distance from you. “It was a heartless bastard because he seems to have no problem with pitching an infinite number of his spiked progeny to their death in an attempt to wound or at least annoy Mario.” Fxxk yea.

Yet, I can’t imagine enjoying it if the game was just to run through the courses, collect the coins, eat some mushrooms, and pull down some flagpoles. The enemies and the wrath they brought made the game truly enjoyable.

Can I see life the same way? Can I find enough bad characters from Super Mario Brothers to label all the shit in life that will find me? What’s my Lakitu?